by Nigel Jones
So far the poet. How should he behold
That journey home, the long connubial years?
He does not tell you how white Helen bears
Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,
Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold
Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys
’Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice
Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.
Often he wonders why on earth he went
Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.
Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;
Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name.
So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;
And Paris slept on by Scamander side.
Here Brooke boldly goes where Homer feared to tread, and follows the protagonists of the Iliad offstage. The poem is remarkable in its disgust with the processes of ageing and reproduction, and its misogynistic revulsion at female mortality. Insult is piled on insult until one suspects that ‘Menelaus and Helen’ should be retitled ‘William Parker and Mary Ruth’. Despite, or because of, this personal input of bile, the power of the poet’s horror at the banality of human existence is undeniable.
As the Tripos approached, Brooke, knowing of the likely outcome, began to cast about for a new home where he could indulge in ‘dew-dabbling’ more freely than in frigid Cambridge, with its continual calls on his precious time. When another Kingsman, A. F. Scholfield, who had plucked Brooke from obscurity to stardom when he picked him to take a part in Eumenides, invited him to share lodgings, he declined the offer, explaining: ‘I am passionately enamoured of solitude; and as a housemate I cannot imagine myself as anything but wildly irritating … I am going to try to get rooms in Grantchester … I passionately long to shut myself up and read only and always …’
Grantchester, a small village some two miles south-west of Cambridge on the upper reaches of the Cam, where it becomes the Granta stream, is the place that Brooke was to call home for the rest of his life. He had got to know the spot on walks with Geoffrey Keynes. He immortalized the village in his poetry as an emblem of England, but its history long preceded him. The site of Trumpington Mill, the setting for Chaucer’s ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, Grantchester dates back to pre-Roman times, when there was a ford below the mill. Another English poet who died in Greece, Lord Byron – a Trinity man – had bathed in the pool there that still bears his name.
A century after his lame Lordship swam that pool, Mrs J. W. Stevenson opened a tearoom at her riverside home, the Orchard, which had become a favourite of students out for a weekend stroll. Brooke heard that rooms were available at the Orchard – two bedrooms and a ground-floor sitting-room, with free use of the garden. He agreed to take them for 30 shillings a week.
Before moving in, Brooke sat the dreaded Tripos. Between taking the exams and receiving the results, he went to stay with his cousin Erica Cotterill at Godalming in Surrey. The main attraction, besides seeing his most durable pen-friend, he confided to his ally Dudley Ward: ‘Oh ho! The South! The Lakes of Surrey! They call me! And I shall possibly see Noel in the distance!’ Angling for an invitation to visit Noel at nearby Bedales, Brooke wrote to her on 28 May describing his academic ordeal:
At eleven o’clock this morning I finished the last paper of my Classical Tripos. There were 108 other candidates in the room, but they all stayed the full time, till noon. They write longer, better papers than mine. (They all wear spectacles.) I wrote my translation of the last Latin word (the last Latin word I shall ever translate in my life. Glory!), which happened to be ‘Good-bye!’ The fitness delighted me, and I screamed with laughter, suddenly; & the hundred & eight turned round & blinked. I nodded at a hairless don who was in command, & ran cheerily out of the room, tearing the examination paper to bits as I went. I sang loudly all the way to my rooms, & annoyed all the policemen & danced a little; & when I got here I burned the paper, & I keep the ashes in an Urn. I shall never read Latin or Greek again.
The schoolboy squeak of delight at his liberation from the Classics (‘No more Latin, no more French/No more sitting on the old schoolbench’) is as audible here as his totemic disdain for his personal symbols of senile decay, baldness and myopia. In Brooke’s world it is a sin to be old or even ageing.
He goes on to propose dropping in at Bedales during his Godalming stay, in company with Jacques Raverat, who had returned from a two-year exile in France and was living in the village of Froxfield, near his old school. Brooke is evidently on tenterhooks as to his reception: ‘Shall I just … see you about? Or shall I definitely SEE you … it occasionally seems to me rather impossible, quite impossible. Schools are so mad. And my malign appearance, & influence!’ He leaves his ego an escape route: ‘You can, and may, evade, or stop me. (Surely we have got beyond the last insult of politeness?) … You understand all things in the world … and you are a thousand years old, and we know each other perfectly; you must decide.’ Noel’s third-person answer cannot have pleased Brooke: ‘She wishes you weren’t coming; but she daren’t say so out right, for fear of offending your pride.’
Brooke’s reply, from Erica’s home at Godalming, Coombe Field, was written in a tone of barely controlled fury: ‘God (a thing you don’t believe in) burn (a sensation you’ve never had) you (You!), Madam (a title given in honour, reverence and admiration to the middle-aged) (now used in the most scathing sarcasm)! … You’re a devil. Beginning by assigning a time, going on to water it down, down … and ending by a post-script in the third person … changing the whole thing, & leaving me cr-r-ushed.’
In the event, given Noel’s less than thrilled response to his threatened descent, Brooke did not proceed with his plan, but instead of shelving it altogether merely postponed it. His obsession with her continued at full throttle.
Meanwhile there was the result of the Tripos to deal with. Brooke received a poor Second. Despite anticipating this, he felt as crushed in his academic hopes as Noel’s rejection had left him dashed in his personal self-esteem. He sought comfort with the newly married Frances Cornford, who wisely neglected to tell him that her husband Francis had been one of Brooke’s examiners, and who knew how narrowly he had escaped getting a Third. An ashen-faced Brooke confessed that he was most worried by his mother’s reaction. Rallying, he resolved to put all he had, academically, into redeeming his failure over the next year by entering the King’s Shakespeare scholarship – the Charles Oldham Award – with a dissertation on his favourite dramatist, John Webster. In order to concentrate on this goal in undisturbed seclusion, he moved to Grantchester without further ado.
Relieved to have got the burden of the Tripos shifted from his shoulders, however unsatisfactorily, Brooke relaxed in his new rural surroundings, and, true to form, lost no time in telling his friends, in exaggerated terms, of his exuberant contentment: ‘This is a divine spot,’ he informed Hugh Dalton. ‘I eat only strawberries and honey.’ He referred to his new home as ‘Arcadee’. At the end of July he told Noel:
I work at Shakespeare and see few people … In the intervals I wander about bare foot and almost naked, surveying Nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand Nature, but I get on very well with her, in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together … I get on very well by addressing all flowers ‘Hello, Buttercup!’ and all animals ‘Puss! Puss!’ I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work. Of a morning Dudley Ward and a shifting crowd come out from Cambridge and bathe with me, have breakfast (out in the garden, as all meals) and depart.
Noel responded to this torrent of burbling whimsy with a put-down as brutal as a Bedales douche. Enraged by Brooke telling her that the Ranee had disparagingly called her ‘Quite a schoolgirl’, Noel let fly:
I know this is a beastly and absurd letter, but few pe
ople, and certainly not I, would be capable of answering that – what was it? – letter you sent. I dont quite see how it is you can enjoy breakfast – and all meals – but especially breakfast in a rose garden this sort of weather, I should think that butter would be too hard frozen and the coffee – I beg your pardon, of course you dont drink such poisonous stimulants, but milk – the milk too diluted with dirty rain water – dirty with Cambridge soots – to be enjoyable. But no doubt you have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment, only I wish you wouldnt talk of Nature in that foolish and innocent tone of voice – you call it making jokes, and I suppose you think its nice; but I dont like it a bit – Ive told you why lots of times.
She concluded: ‘I’m sorry – I’m in a very bad rage – because I’ve been doing easy exams badly – a thing you never did, so you cant sympathise. Dont try. from Noel.’
This unaccustomed deflation left Brooke winded. With her Olivier common sense, Noel had unerringly pinpointed his irritating habit of rhapsodizing about himself, and he didn’t like it. He preferred uncritical correspondents like Erica, to whom he wrote in customary self-regarding vein:
I work at Shakespeare, read, write all day, & now & then wander in the woods or by the river. I bathe every morning & sometimes by moonlight, have all my meals (chiefly fruit) brought to me out of doors, & am as happy as the day’s long. I’m chiefly sorry for all you people in the world. Every now & then dull bald spectacled people from Cambridge come out & take tea here. I mock them & pour the cream down their necks or roll them in the rose-beds or push them in the river, & they hate me & go away.
Of course Brooke couldn’t really have been like this, or he would have been lynched from one of his rose trees with one of his open-necked shirts. But he felt it necessary to construct and broadcast this image of himself. In the summer of 1909 a caricature of a new Brooke was firmly in place in his own mind – and consequently in that of his friends. The previous pose of a languid Decadent was replaced by that of a whimsical wandering child of nature, a fruitarian in bare feet talking to flowers and communing with poesy. Many of the friends he gathered around him became disciples – a tribute to his ability to inspire others to devotion.
His attempt to escape from the buzz of Cambridge to the tranquillity of the countryside was only half-serious. Grantchester provided him with a wider stage on which to perform, and he went about it with gusto. Within weeks he was entertaining Eddie Marsh and astonishing his landlords, the Stevensons, with his uniform of striped blazers, loose shirts and once, embarking on a London trip, bowler hat, gloves and – shades of ‘John Rump’ – an umbrella.
Before moving to Grantchester Brooke rebuffed yet another advance from the indefatigable James Strachey. According to James’s account to Duncan Grant, he had discovered Brooke in bed and asked for his fingers to kiss, a request which Brooke refused. James comments: ‘I found out something about him which DID make me despair. He’s a REAL womanizer. And there can be no doubt that he hates the physical part of my feelings instinctively. Just as I should hate to be touched by a woman. I think also that he has to some extent a dislike of everything physical – that he has a trace at least of virginity.’ James, the future psychoanalyst, here sniffs out one of Brooke’s most shameful secrets – his prudishness. In early July Brooke rubbed salt in the wound by teasing James about his meeting with his old Rugby flame, Charlie Lascelles: ‘You may see Charlie if you’re good, for a second. But not talk to him.’
Brooke had barely settled into his new quarters when he was called upon to entertain one of the grandest of England’s men of letters – none other than ‘the Master’, Henry James. The distinguished novelist had been lured to Cambridge after much negotiating by what he called a ‘triumvirate’ of admirers – Geoffrey Keynes, Charles Sayle and a colleague of Sayle’s named Theo Bartholemew. After touring the university James was conveyed to Keynes’s rooms in Pembroke for lunch on Saturday 12 June. One of the select guests was Brooke, and, in Keynes’s words ‘there is no doubt that James fell at once under the spell of Rupert Brooke’.
James had an opportunity to renew his admiration the following morning, when he was guest at a breakfast hosted by Maynard Keynes. Brooke was present again, and once more caught the author’s eye. James asked another guest, Desmond MacCarthy, about the identity of the ‘long quiet youth with fair hair who sometimes smiled’. When told that Brooke was a poet, but not a good one, James responded: ‘Well I must say I am RELIEVED, for with THAT appearance if he had also talent it would be too unfair.’ James then engaged Brooke in conversation, allegedly telling him loftily not to be afraid to be unhappy.
Clearly smitten, as so many bachelors were, by Brooke’s radiance, James was delighted to discover him in attendance yet again the following morning when the novelist was persuaded to ease his bulky form into a punt for a stately progress down the Cam along the Backs. Geoffrey Keynes takes up the tale:
The process of pushing off from the landing stage was marred when Sayle dropped the pole with a crack on the large, shiny, yellowish dome of James’s bald head. Fortunately, no serious harm was done, and Rupert Brooke … assumed the task of poling the punt. Henry James enjoyed the unaccustomed experience to the full and an unforgettable image of him remains, lying comfortably on the cushions and gazing up through prominent half-closed eyes at Brooke’s handsome figure clad in white shirt and white flannel trousers.
Asked later how he had performed in the unnerving presence of the most distinguished but possibly least-read novelist of his era, Brooke smilingly confessed to Frances Cornford that he had pulled off what he knowingly called his ‘fresh, boyish stunt’ with aplomb. It evidently worked to stunning effect, for James remained in besotted reverence for the rest of Brooke’s life. He wept when he learned of his death, and his last published work was a lachrymose introduction to a collection of Brooke’s travel writing, Letters from America (1916), in which he fondly recalled, in typical Jamesian fashion, the vision of Brooke on the river, ‘with his felicities all most promptly divinable’.
An equally famous but far more bohemian figure appeared in Brooke’s life the following month when Augustus John came to camp at Grantchester. The bearded, fierce-eyed portraitist, then just turned 30 and at the height of his notoriety for his free-living, free-loving ways, had been commissioned to paint a portrait of a Newnham don, Jane Harrison, an acquaintance of Brooke from the Marlowe Dramatic Society. He chose to bring his tribe of six horses, two caravans, one cart, seven children, wife, sister-in-law and odd-job boy to roost in Grantchester meadows. Brooke was already an admirer of John’s art, having put aside part of his allowance the previous year to purchase two of his drawings, and he lost no time in getting acquainted with a way of life that fascinated him but in which he was far too respectable to do more than dabble.
At this stage in his peripatetic existence, John was obsessed by gypsies, and the arrival of his caravanserai seemed as exotic to the Grantchester rustics as the descent of a sheikh and his seraglio. Brooke was as wide-eyed as any, and was soon boasting to Noel:
Augustus John (the greatest painter) (of whom I have told you) with two wives and seven children (all male, between 3 and 7 years) with their two caravans and a gypsy tent, are encamped by the river, a few hundred yards from here. I go and see them sometimes, and they come here to meals … the chief wife is a very beautiful woman. And the children are lovely brown wild bare people dressed, if at all, in lovely yellow, red or brown tattered garments of John’s own choosing. Yesterday Donald Robertson, Dudley Ward and I took them all up the river in punts, gave them tea and played with them. They talked to us of an imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats, and the sky Robin’s blue pinafore. Robin was the smallest. The sun was a spot of honey on Robin’s blue pinafore …
Noel responded to this Peter Pannish vision with another withering put-down: ‘As for the way you and Dudley – babies
both – suddenly in your old age rediscover the charming imaginations of children of 5 and listen to and remember their obvious descriptions of imaginary worlds, when you yourselves have only just left that stage, THAT is a joke – perhaps you meant it as such, but not likely.’ One begins to suspect that Brooke was attracted to Noel in part precisely because of her no-nonsense rebukes, which possibly reminded him of the Ranee. Although, ironically, she was barely out of childhood herself, her attitude was that of a worldly-wise adult ‘earthing’ an ethereal child. It seems to have been this cold quality in all the Oliviers that perversely attracted Brooke – certainly Noel was the one member of his circle who could be relied upon to squash his tendency to whimsy. But she could not crush it completely, and Grantchester remained in his imagination a land of milk and honey.
The other observation that can be made of the Henry James and Augustus John episodes is their demonstration of Brooke’s uncanny skill at what we would call networking. He spared no effort to charm and court these very different sacred monsters – and succeeded. It is this ability to dazzle the good and the great that goes a long way to explain why he was fast becoming a legend in his own lifetime. The romantic words ‘Rupert Brooke’ were already becoming a rubric to conjure with in worlds beyond Cambridge and Grantchester.
Undeterred by Noel’s brutal douching of his wooing, Brooke, with that dogged determination that was as much a part of his Protean nature as his whimsy, put into effect his plan to visit her at Bedales. His instrument on this occasion was Jacques Raverat, who came to visit him in his new domain at Grantchester. Brooke arranged for Jacques to lodge at the Old Vicarage, a rambling ruin of a house next door to the Orchard. He was curious about the place, and was already hatching an ambition to live there himself. The observant Frenchman, who had not seen Brooke for two years, noted the changes that had occurred in his friend: he had become a vegetarian, forsworn alcohol and tobacco, and appeared to be pursuing his studies with effort and determination.